After River

by Donna Milner

A sensitive but fast-moving plot of what happens when a happy-as-the-Waltons Canadian farming family is invaded by the Sixties - Vietnam, drugs and sexual freedom. Then, in the present, a reflective healing process for the wounds that the uncertainties and openness of that decade inflicted.

Extract

'I couldn't sit back while the war and the bombing was escalating and not stand up against it. I joined the peace movement. When I received my draft card, burning it, leaving, was my only way to protest the actions of a government I no longer believe in.'
'Well I guess Canada's not as bad as prison,' Dad snorted.
'Being in exile is its own prison,' River said.
There was silence at the table. Like me, Morgan and Carl had watched the conversation without joining in. I wondered then what they, and Boyer, would do if they had to face the same decisions. I wondered if they too were thinking that it was only an accident of birth, of being a few thousand feet from an invisible line, that made their choices so simple compared to this young American, who in the end, was not so different from themselves.